Cranky Food Friends was a new IP for Sega that I helped design from the ground up. The gameplay, a match four puzzle game with card battle and RPG elements was already set when I was asked to come up with a look and feel for a food game that would appeal to casual female puzzle fans.

A softly shaded attempt, done before I was asked to take a stab at the theme, had tested poorly. So I pulled inspiration from Etsy, Pinterest, webcomics, and internet memes that were beloved by the women we hoped would love our game, and designed super simple, grumpy characters with a subtle paper texture, giving the game a bit of a cut paper feel that would feel hipper and craftier.

The art tested through the roof and throughout development always came back rated as players' favorite aspect of the game.

The saga map shown above was designed to be modular. I wanted to give the level designers the ability to add levels or change the sequencing of areas without requiring us to repaint the map.

We needed hundreds of characters in a short amount of time and with a limited budget so I designed the style to accommodate the fact that artists would need to create multiple characters per day. I was able to keep the art team on schedule or ahead of schedule throughout development, providing frequent paint-overs and notes to keep up the quality and maintain a unified vision.

We had a fun puzzle mechanic, but one players hadn't seen before. Players assumed it was a standard match three game and of course nobody wanted to read through a tutorial so I needed to figure out a visual way to show that this was different than what players had experienced in the past.

Players swipe to remove pieces from the board, but the pieces they remove are arbitrary. Points are determined entirely by the combos that are made when the pieces above those you remove collide with the pieces under them, so I shrank and desaturated the pieces as players touched them to make it clear that those pieces and what color they were no longer mattered.

The key bit was to have all the pieces above the pieces you are removing look down excitedly and move with anticipation of joining the pieces below. The effect is extremely subtle in a screenshot, but when animated effectively drew the players attention to the key information. The moving pieces were going to fall and collide with the pieces they were looking down at to make combos. This solved our gameplay confusion problem.

There wasn't as much room for narrative built into the single player campaign mode as we wanted so I came up with a way to pull narrative into the character evolution process itself. This also provided an emotional, story-driven hook for players to level up their characters, something key to monetization.